Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born in 1894 to an illiterate peasant family in Kalinovka, a village near Russia's border with Ukraine. To supplement his family's meager income he began working at an early age, but despite this, and despite his father's second job as a coal miner, Khrushchev's family was unable to survive as farmers. In 1908 they moved to an industrial center in Ukraine, where young Nikita began working in a factory. It was the beginning …

…U-2 affair, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile crisis. At the same time, he was the first Soviet leader to advocate "peaceful coexistence" with the West, and to negotiate with the United States on reducing Cold War tensions. By 1964, his reforms had alienated too many powerful Soviet constituencies. A group of conservatives led by Leonid Brezhnev ousted Khrushchev, and he retired to a dacha in rural Russia, where he died in 1971.